HDLU - Karas Gallery

Praška 4, Zagreb

Melita Sorola Stančić: Samutra

18. 3. - 5. 4. 2009

/ Exhibition opening: Thursday, March 18, 2009 at 8 pm

Ship

By its meditative quality, measured gesture and using monochromaticity Melita’s painting, that matured in the 1990s , can be classified as ‘colour-field painting’, a term coined by critics to denote a more moderate tendency within ‘American abstract expressionism’. This tendency’s main representative, painter Barnett Newman, proclaimed it “sublime”, claiming how the essence of painting is not in what is painted, but within what the viewer projected into a painting. In this way he explained a turnabout in painting’s interpretation which occurred with the rise of the first abstract painting, and which presumed a shift in the centre of gravity from content to effect, beyond what’s painted. Without doubt, I would apply this same recipe in Melita’s case, since from the beginning she’s been using only two generic geometric figures – circle and line - which she varied in few derivatives: ellipse, point, arch and circle. In this manner her painting world is written in the externality, as a paradigm of natural phenomena like stars, Moon or sea horizon. In this game Melita is an observer of universe, interested in entities from the other side of the visible, in a field of phenomenology of perception which explains how experience of the abstract form such as circle is reflected to a sense of time’s duration. If you take notice of her exhibitions’ titles such as Moment, Infinite, Image and Time, Journey into the Flux of Feelings, you will realize that all of them generate an iconography of temporality. The actual morphological form of the word temporality is so clumsy that it was never adopted by everyday speech and that finally, it became something we never speak of but do feel it. This introduction serves an assumption claiming that all the painting procedures could be transferred onto the more recent works made in media of photography and video.

Three years ago, Juraj Klović Gallery hosted the author’s exhibition similar to the present one. It was also a tripartite exhibition, and its one part was called Samutra – Tango Argentino, same as here. A direct formal connection between these exhibitions is tangoing, which at the occasion happened for real, while this time a document of tango happening is being exhibited. However, it seems the crucial link is something else: a yearning for a ship that has sailed away, leaving behind a wide horizon and long expectation. After insight into the central, visually most stratified work of the exhibition in which passenger ship sails away an infinite number of times, the observer becomes stretched between poetic and traumatic feelings. The motion of the ships which we follow until they get out of our sight truly awakens some inexplicable yearning; farewell-sounding sirens get suddenly smothered above the city, evoking distance. But, persistent repetitions of sailing out, each lasting for a few minutes, awakens a feeling of unrealized navigation, forbidden pleasure, discomfort of a sickening return to the same. The reason, of course, is the hidden editing, sudden cuts which always, again, brutally interrupt barely initiated setting out to the high seas, but also in a raw material, recorded from static standpoint. Certainly, despite clear contextualization and recognizable scene of Rijeka port (M/S Marco Polo and M/S Liburnia), as well as intimate life milieu of the author, Ship is a video which should be understood as a place of intuitive articulating of accretions of emotional stuff. To be sure, the author touches a female archetype in tradition of seamanship in Littoral area where from the ancient times women waited, alone. However, in this case we cannot literally speak of the subject, especially for obvious radical social-economic changes in life of seamen and incomparably larger socialization of the women, due to which this phenomenon in contemporary society gained totally new meanings of which here it is not necessary, nor pertinent to speak ( ethnologic themes belong to some other essay). Instead, Melita speaks of experience of waiting which is at least irritating. However, her survival instinct sublimes it into time recording, following regular intervals: photographs were shot at 4.30 p.m. from winter to summer solstice, which is also the name of the cycle. Sailing out of the passenger ships was recorded each Friday, within a period of one to two years. In this manner she achieved two opposite results: apparently she ignores lengthiness, paying special attention to consistent time structure, as if it was essential, whereby she paradoxically emphasises a feeling of slow time flow.

Photos and video reveal this is actually a method of deconstruction and reconstruction which Melita applies in that very order, so that first she cuts and crumbles into sequences and consequently composes them into a whole, repetitively. Partially for her personal inclination which can be noticed in her paintings and drawings, and somewhat for contextual linking with the motif of seamanship, the author exaggeratedly uses repetition, varying the same, creating fatigue of waiting. It is interesting she stays away from any sensation, and subordinates everything to a rhythm of inner emotional beat, which I deem a quality shift in relation to her previous works, hereby not referring to better of worse quality but different poetics imposed by the medium of video. They say video is a motion picture, which the author’s hand does not polish, but endows it with rhythm though process of editing. Let us also mention that a sequence of randomly shot seascapes of Cres and Krk islands and Vela vrata passage altogether reveal this is no “art” material but ordinary documentary one, by which we observe the change of seasons.

If an accidental visitor wishes to read out the exhibition in a wholesome manner, I believe s/he has to round the exhibits many times, because only together all of the three render a narrative visible. When we again walk to Ranko Dokmanović’s photographs documenting tango in Klović Gallery in 2004 (Samutra Tango Argentino), the works get connected into a since silent confession of reasons for waiting.

Sabina Salamon, December 2007.

Melita Sorola Stančić

Born 1964 in Rijeka. Lives in Volosko since 1982.

Graduated from the Secondary School for Culture and Education in 1984.

In 1990 graduated painting from the Visual Arts Department of the Pedagogical Faculty in Rijeka.

A member of The Croatian Association of Visual Artists in Rijeka and The Freelance Artists Association since 1994.

A member of Moving Academy for Performing Arts - Amsterdam – Zagreb since 1995.

In 1996 she became a cofounder and member of ‘Ura’ art group (Badurina , Božić, Šikanja, Todorović).

In 2007 she enrolled postgraduate study of sculpting at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Ljubljana, under mentorship of professor Jože Barši.